That's a fair point. Diablo 1 was nothing but a very early soul game, like Dark Souls 3. The butcher was like Index Gundir etc.

If you change DS3 point of view to top-up, it would be a good candidate for D3 even D4.

D3 and D4 were made to be non-violent, non-upsetting, and MMO style. A story telling abra-cadabra that brought Cineplex into your gameplay making it less interactive.

Interesting thread, even if we’ve heard it all before there are some fruitful perspectives. I think it’s clear D4 will continue mistakes made in D3 and OP already explained why. D3/4 is top-down-designed horse shit, the creative potential was dead on arrival, constrained to “It will have this and this” etc. etc. will always lead to bland equitable results, and it happens to a lot of modern games.

We’re lucky to have games like D2 where the developers had fun making them. Using the opposite approach, a bottom-up design leaving the end results of play ambiguous and in the player’s hands.

Lucky to have game studios like From Software who honestly have taken the torch from the old days and have made modern masterpieces. Dark Souls is in a lot of ways a Diablo game. If Blizzard still operated like a company making fun games, their results would look more like From’s. Experimenting and pushing into different genre or mechanics or camera angle or, ffs anything different

Blizzard seem obsessed with recapturing Diablo but have not demonstrated a fundamental understanding of what that means. So we get superficial results instead.


Wish I could remember where I read this, but some previous employees have described various internal iterations of Diablo projects in the 2010s that were ultimately cancelled. One such iteration was a 3rd person action rpg with horror elements and I can’t for the life of me understand why they axed it.

Anyway back to playing d2r and souls games

Just watched the newest "gameplay video"

I haven't been following it because I already knew it was gonna be a Diablo 3 clone. They're catering to the young kid audience.

It actually makes me sick. D2R IMO will always be more popular than D4 will ever be.

why do I have the feeling that everyone is going to buy the game and after a month come back to D2R?
Nobody is extremely excited about it given the track record of new Blizzard.
And if you are on d2jsp you love the trading system now, doubt that you will like restricted loot and trading.

Yeah, I agree. But I think it'll take longer. Hope dies last. And people will be trying to fool themselves "Oh, it's just the initial release, they'll fix things, add more content, expansions...". Yeah, sure. I've observed it in both D3 and SC2 and it never works this way. Once the game is released and it sucks, it sucks forever. No hope.

Smart loot just finally nuked D4 for me.

There is always hope, unless it's a Blizzard game.

When I tried Diablo immortal I remember what I hated about d3. This improvements from 30->35 intelligence items really suck. I want different mechanics that I can improve on my items so I can balance them out. D3 is just a stat war

True and correct, but what do you expect? Blizzard lost a lot of the solid game design talent they had in the past.

Cinematics and graphics might look better due to tech improvements, but the creative aspect (the underlying design) for D4 is going to suck.

This post was edited by ulmaguest on Sep 4 2022 03:41pm